Tease

We were told in our first days there that we were all going to go to a top class university and a professional career. Our form teacher said,
“This school has the reputation of being the best in England, and your destiny is to make a professional career after going to university. Most of our Upper Sixth leavers go to Oxbridge.”
It meant little to us. The targets he was telling us were seven years away and we were eleven years old. Half a lifetime. And where is Oxbridge? It’s not in the atlas I looked for it in. The other thing was that he expected us to fit into some mould like we weren’t people, but meat pies on a conveyor belt.

There are four of us in our gang. Walrus is a fat boy. He’s not built like Billy Bunter, but he is overweight, lazy and a bit of a bully. We all are some of the time. One of our targets is the very wimpish Three T’s, who we usually call Tease. We also target the weaker teachers. There are others as well. Take The Blob, for example. A couple of months ago Walrus and me were going through the park to our bus stop and the Blob was ahead of us walking quickly to his bus stop. When he walks he keeps his knees together like he’s wet himself or needs the toilet. When he runs it looks like a silent movie. Walrus and me were behind him, poking fun at him and he was ignoring us and Walrus got angry. He suddenly screamed ‘Banzai!’ and ran at The Blob with his arms outstretched, jumped on his back and they crashed to the ground. When I caught up The Blob’s nose was running with snot and blood. Walrus was playing the Japanese kamikaze pilot. He’d crashed into his target and now he was dead, lying on his back across The Blob’s back. I was killing myself laughing. I hauled the Walrus away – a minor triumph because he’s big and I’m a runt. We went on our way to catch the bus, leaving the snivelling Blob in our wake.

I don’t know why we do this sort of thing. I suppose it’s to do with being a part of something rather than a loner like Tease or The Blob. I mean, when you’re bottom of the bottom class and not even good at sport you’ve got to compensate somehow.

We thought Tease was no good at anything. He did badly in lessons (though I did worse) and wasn’t part of any group. Like the Lone Ranger without Tonto and the glory. He got his nickname because his parents had him baptised Timothy Thomas Taylor. He was the butt of loads of bad mouthing and bullying, but mostly he was totally ignored, sent to Coventry. I can’t even remember a teacher asking him a question in class, so they obviously thought he was worthless too apart from Olly who made him the book monitor. Even so, this story is mainly about him.

Lots of our teachers write textbooks. It’s funny, but the school buys them in by the ton for the greater benefit of the boys and the greater pay packet of the masters. I remember the impression one such volume made on the head of the lad in front of me in a maths class when he wasn’t paying attention. Mr Marsh, known as The Bog, always wandered around with the book he’d written as his favoured assault weapon in the Battle Against Ignorance. Book met head and won the battle.

Schoolboys are cruel animals, especially in gangs, groups or whatever. One day stands out especially. Before Registration began Tease had been reduced to tears. Walls is my best friend. Well, his dad is a wholesaler in the city, and I reckon Walls had some of that breeding in his blood, because he sold Tease as a slave to his big brother’s class. I found out later that Tease had been shoved into the narrow space behind the classroom door and gobbed on by a group of his new owners. Perhaps being ignored wasn’t so bad after all! He didn’t turn up for first lesson. He missed dodgems.

Samuel Cohen is a really nice guy for a teacher. We all call him Sid on account of him being Jewish – it’s rhyming slang. He teaches French and had we know he will help us if we go to him individually – he’s a caring teacher. We treat him badly when we’re in class though. He’s no good with boys whose ambitions exclude mastering the French language. And we are three gamma, the lowest of the low, with a built in ambition to do little and do it badly.

Our desks are ancient, so old that some of the graffiti carved onto them is in hieroglyphics! They have lids you can lift to reveal the sweet wrappers, dust, and old chewing gum of every age since the Romans. Sometimes you might find the odd book in there. The lid slopes gently, perfect for rolling pens and pencils when there’s nothing else to relieve the droning of the masters. Beyond the hinge is a narrow strip of desk top, with a groove for non-rolling writing sticks and a hole for an inkwell that doubles as an oubliette for our sweet wrappers. We learned about oubliettes in Happy Jack’s History class a couple of years ago before he had his breakdown. Anyway, these desks are attached to bench seats by what looks like the runners of some abandoned sledge. Together the desk and bench make the dodgem, and we each have one.

Of course, fairground dodgems have metallic floors to run on and that wire mesh ceiling to give an electric charge to power the motor. In Sid’s classroom the motor is our legs and the power is our imagination. Whenever Sid turns to use the blackboard to explain grammar like the future perfect (he always tells us ours won’t be) that’s when three gamma swap places in the room taking our desks with us. And just like the fairground, the object is to avoid crashing. It’s strange that no one’s been caught. It’s as if he knows it’s happening but doesn’t want to be bothered giving us detentions. There’s not many who would choose to spend more time with us than they have to. Or perhaps he reckons boys will be boys and lets us get away with it. I hope not – it’d be less fun.

Walls is tall for his age, and beanpole thin. We always call him Walls, not Bricks or Sausage or Ice Cream, just Walls. It was Walls who introduced me to nitrogen tri-iodide, a distant relative of TNT. It’s easy to make, and if you get to school early enough, after the cleaners had finished in the labs, but before the technicians and teachers arrive, you can whip up some tri paste to use during the day.

On the same day we sold Tease to Big Walls’ class he arrived back with us after missing dodgems, into time for English. It’s hard to get away with anything in John Oliver’s lessons. He’s a strict unjust bastard, no mistake. But Walls had some tripaste, and you couldn’t let it dry out, because then it becomes really unstable. Apparently dry tri can explode at the touch of a feather.

‘Olly’ Oliver is a man of habit. In fact he’s predictable and even obsessive about routines. On the other hand he’s unpredictable and unreasonable when his routine is disturbed. That’s why we thought it was strange at the start of the year he came late week after week for this lesson with us on Tuesdays. A rumour began that he had a free period before us and spent it screwing one of the other queens on the staff. Later on we found out that he had a games lesson before our English period. It didn’t stop the bonking rumours though. Shower room romps are common in school if the rumours are true.

Anyway, Walls had a few minutes to spare before Olly arrived. He set to with the explosive, smearing some on the door frame and then some on Tease’s bench where it made contact with the girder frame when he sat down. We were doing Hamlet and Walls went through the stack of books quickly, with tri painted on the cover of every seventh copy. Then to finish off his supply he put tri paste on the soles of his shoes and the same on some other boys’ shoes. He went back to his place, walking on his heels, and stood, as we all had to, for the teacher to come. Tease arrived and, as he always used to, he scurried to his place without raising his eyes from the floor two paces in front of him.

A couple of boys with seconds hands on their watches whispered a countdown from twenty seconds to ten. Ten seconds later Olly walked in – on schedule as always. He swung the door which shut with an expectedly loud bang which Olly didn’t seem to notice.

“Taylor, the books.” An abrupt command from an English teacher with, maybe, thirty thousand words in his vocabulary, but obviously not happy about wasting a verb on Tease. Tease shuffled to the book stack unaware of the prank which Walls had set up.

Olly sat on the corner of his desk, arms folded, right over left and under, and his legs wrapped round the table leg, left over right and behind, like a bloody reef knot. He expects speed so Tease was almost hurling the books onto our desks. On the seventh desk there was a louder impact noise. Olly looked at Tease who stared at Hamlet, each accusing the other of doing something wrong. Tease looked like a boggle eyed baby, unsure whether the squeaky toy is fun or a threat.
“Get on with it, Taylor.” A tired, I’ve-seen-it-all-before tone.
The fourteenth book banged down and Tease’s face began to crumple into pre-blubberdom. Books twenty-one and twenty eight sent him beyond tears to terror and though his eyes pointed down at the parquet he was focussed on the imaginary hole he wished he could hide in.

“Get out of my classroom, boy! You’re wasting our oxygen in here!” Olly never raises his voice. He always raises a smile from those of us who enjoyed persecuting Tease. Tease shuffled out, head sunk into his chest, and missed the second lesson of the day. Olly didn’t invite back until five minutes from the bell. The lesson had been uneventful apart from occasional minor explosions from the soles of forgetful boys’ shoes. Then Tease was summoned.

“Someone call that insignificant pestilence back in”, Olly had said. More smirks from the nitrogen tri iodide gang. Tease had been crying, but wasn’t now. He guessed correctly that injustice was about to be done to him by a man who rarely changed his mind. Mr Oliver sentenced the innocent boy to detention for three nights, an hour each one. Talking in the gang at dinner time we all decided that this wasn’t fair, but none of us would go to Olly and own up? He was well known for over the top punishments and, to be honest, part of the little fun we had in his lessons was to see how severe he would be over minor matters. Like all bullies we are cowards; we stayed mum.

Tease stayed away from school for two weeks after that. Strange, but we kind of missed him. It was as if our purpose as a gang had been taken away from us. We still broke the rules when we thought we could get away with it and made jokes at the expense of boys we knew wouldn’t retaliate. Olly found other victims for his sarcasm. It wasn’t the same though. It was like an endangered species had died out and, even though we were responsible, we regretted it.

Thursday two weeks later he returned. It was only afterwards that I remembered that Tease looked different. He wasn’t staring at the ground as if it was going to turn on him as well. He held his head up and there was a trace of a smile too.

Thursdays begin with whole school Assembly in the main hall. Olly always played the piano. That day we paraded in. It was the same routine, neat rows of students trooping to the neat rows of chairs with the form teacher sitting at the end. We sat. The headmaster arrived and we stood. We sat again. He read notices that we took no notice of, usually comments about behaviour and then announced the hymn we were to sing. We stood – again. This Thursday we were to sing what he called ‘the school hymn’. It wasn’t though, because it was written centuries before the school was thought of, by Isaac Watts and even he wasn’t the original author, because it was cribbed from some psalm. I get detentions for cribbing work, but Watts got famous for Oh God, our help in ages past.

The sound of twelve hundred boys getting up isn’t loud, but when they get ready to sing, or rather to mumble a hymn, there’s so much throat clearing and coughing it’s like dredging the Suez Canal. Olly strode over to the piano. He extended his arms like he was a concert pianist to get his cuffs out of the way and started the intro which is always the first line without the words. If we had been singing we would have managed to get out ‘Oh God’ before the explosion. Pandemonium broke out like I’ve never seen it before. Chairs got tipped up, pupils ran in all directions and the head vanished into the wings of the stage. There were only two people still sitting. Olly had his hands on the keyboard of the piano which had had its front and back splintered. He was crying and gazing at his scorched trouser legs. The other person still sitting was Tease, and a look of intense satisfaction filled his face.

The greatest prank in the history of the school was by someone who was the greatest wimp. We never saw Tease again after that Thursday. Olly didn’t stay much longer either. He left at the end of term, a broken man.